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    A Premier League Love Story Has Heartbreak Ahead

    Luton Town’s rise to the world’s richest soccer league proves England’s fabled merit system still works. What happens next may show that it does not.Within a few days of Luton Town’s promotion to the Premier League in May, the construction crews were moving in and the scaffolding was going up at its stadium, Kenilworth Road. The club’s first home game in English soccer’s top flight since its money-spinning, supercharged rebrand into the richest, most popular league in the world was not quite three months away. There was an alarming amount of work to do, and not nearly enough time to do it.Luton’s stadium has for some time been something of a throwback in English soccer: defiantly cramped, unapologetically tumbledown, the kind of careworn, hostile, raw sort of place most teams have long since left behind in favor of something more modern, more comfortable, possibly just a little bland.Kenilworth Road, though, was both a point of difference and a point of pride, a feature the club had come to regard as a source of strength, rather than weakness.“I don’t think anyone likes coming to the Kenny,” defender Amari’i Bell said last season, using the ground’s affectionate nickname. “When we played Chelsea, I don’t think they enjoyed it. If you come here and you’re not in the right frame of mind, you can’t wait to leave.”The Premier League, though, has commanded that the club dull the edge of that secret weapon, just a little. It has an image to maintain, after all, and that means ensuring all of its stadiums meet certain criteria.Luton’s stadium is tucked so tightly into its neighborhood that one entrance cuts through a row of homes.Carl Recine/ReutersUnsurprisingly, Kenilworth Road did not, and so Luton had to make the first substantive changes to the stadium in years. The work proved so extensive, in fact, that the team requested that its first home game — scheduled for a week from Saturday — be postponed because it couldn’t guarantee the most critical renovations would be completed in time.There were new floodlights to install, old ones to improve. It needed a room for news conferences with seating for 100 journalists, positions for 50 television and data-analysis cameras, and studio space for the league’s broadcasters. The gantry, the high perch where play-by-play commentators call matches, had to be removed, clad in nonflammable material, and reinstalled.One particular edict was relaxed — Luton will not start the season with undersoil heating installed beneath the field — but the preparations were still a colossal undertaking. Gary Sweet, the club’s chief executive, estimated that the cost had amounted to $15 million and rising, but Luton had little choice. The rules change when you make the Premier League.Luton’s arrival in the richest league in the world, 30 years after it last appeared in the top flight, is the culmination to the sort of fairy tale that is central to English soccer’s self-identity. It has been only a decade since Luton was marooned in the sixth tier, mixing with part-time opponents, after spending years sailing closer and closer to oblivion.Now here it is, awaiting Manchester City and Manchester United and Arsenal, in the promised land. One of its players, Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu, has been present every step of the way; he will become the first player in history to feature for the same team in each of England’s top five divisions. Its chief executive, Sweet, is a lifelong fan.The club has said it will pour its Premier League payday into the club’s infrastructure.Carl Recine/ReutersHigh on the list of improvements needed to meet Premier League standards: new floodlights.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersIt is the kind of story that defines England’s romantic vision of its national game, living and breathing proof of the power of its fabled pyramid, the porous superstructure that bonds the Premier League not only to the Football League, which manages the divisions just below it, but to everything below the professional levels of the sport: the National League, the Northern Premier League, the United Counties League.The pyramid is supposed to be a model of social mobility, a pathway from the gutter to the stars. Luton is a case study in its continuing viability. It has made it, and in doing so it has demonstrated that every club — every player — has the right to dream, no matter where they might currently find themselves. Luton shows that anything is possible.Until a certain point. Luton’s prize for promotion was, as is the case for every team to pass through the gilded doors of the world’s most lucrative domestic competition, almost unbelievably rich. The club will earn a minimum of $215 million even if it remains in the Premier League for only a single season. For Luton, that money is transformative.The club plans, for example, to use a considerable proportion of it to finance a new stadium. Luton might love Kenilworth Road, might cherish its ragged edges, but it has long known it requires a new home if it is to have a stable future. A quarter of its Premier League income has been earmarked for that project, Sweet has said.“We are consummate long-term planners,” he said. “We look at planning for the club five or 10 years ahead, actually, rather than five or 10 minutes, which a lot of people do. That’s the golden rule of what our success will be: having a sensible, long-term, financial, strategic plan.” Luton sees its time in the Premier League as a way to “build the foundations for the future.”Victory in last season’s Championship playoff final sent Manager Rob Edwards and Luton Town to the Premier League. Staying there will be something else altogether.Matthew Childs/Action Images Via ReutersIt is hard to refute the idea that this is precisely where any team’s priorities should lie, certainly those outside of the game’s elite, a subset now grown so fat that it is effectively too big to fail.After all, it is another central tenet of English soccer that clubs are not just businesses but social institutions, operated by boards and chief executives and suits of variable origin and quality but owned — on a spiritual level, if not a legal one — by the fans. Their primary interest is, or at least should be, existential: always having a club to support.The problem is that spending money on infrastructure means not spending it on players. This has been another summer of excess for the majority of the teams in the Premier League, where the scale of the spending has at times bordered on the irrational, almost wanton.Declan Rice is now the most expensive English player in history. Manchester City, which won the treble last season with five elite central defenders, added a sixth, Josko Gvardiol, for more than $100 million. Manchester United spent just as much on Rasmus Hojlund, a Danish striker with a grand total of 27 career goals. Liverpool has committed $110 million to two midfielders, and its owners are currently being accused of modern soccer’s greatest sin: parsimony.Luton, by contrast, has performed the sporting equivalent of winning the lottery and immediately investing its winnings in low-yield, long-term bonds. It is not that the club has not spent. By its modest standards, it has: Seven new players have arrived, at a total cost of $20 million or so. Sweet has been at pains to point out that two of those fees have been club records.The emphasis, though, has been on using the Premier League windfall as judiciously, as prudently, as possible, not sacrificing tomorrow for fleeting satisfaction today. The budget, Sweet has conceded, has been “somewhat restricted” by that choice, but the club does not believe such an approach automatically leads to failure.Weeds grew on the steps inside Kenilworth Road this summer.Carl Recine/ReutersWith work on the stadium still not complete, Luton postponed its first home game.Carl Recine/Reuters“We can be competitive,” he said. “We firmly believe that if a group of players are good enough to get you there, they’re generally good enough to keep you there.”That is not quite how it has been received by the Premier League’s never-knowingly underemployed commentariat. Common consensus has it that Luton has effectively doomed itself to relegation — “100 percent,” one former player suggested on the talkSport radio station — by refusing to invest sufficiently, or even suitably, in its squad. Others have suggested that the club’s caution betrays a lack of ambition.It is here, of course, that the reverence for the pyramid begins to look a little like a comforting delusion. There is, indeed, a common thread that binds the game’s lower reaches to the foothills of the Premier League, and a communal romance in witnessing a team traverse it. That ends as soon as the final step is taken. The promised land, it turns out, is all business. The rules change when you make it to the Premier League.Luton can take its place among the elite, but it can never truly belong there, not unless it is prepared to risk its future in favor of its present. It might survive for a season, maybe two, standing by not only its players but its methods, investing in its infrastructure, acting as it should, but at some point it will be caught by sheer, brutal economic reality.As Luton will soon discover, climb high enough, and the nature of the pyramid comes into focus: The sides are not so much steep as sheer cliffs, and off in the distance, the capstone has detached itself completely, separated from the rest of the game by thin air, a gulf that cannot be crossed.Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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    World Cup: Alessia Russo and England See Big Things Ahead

    The secret of the goal that announced Alessia Russo to the world, the out-of-nowhere backheel that stunned Sweden during England’s run to the European Championship last summer, was that Russo wasn’t sure it would happen. That the ball went in the net was, in her words, “maybe luck, maybe instinct.”Last week, the goal she scored to open her account at her first World Cup was something else altogether: a silky first touch, an effortless shift of her weight, a confident finish into the lower left corner. That goal was a striker’s finish, the first of what Russo, and England, hopes will be many more.“I play my best football when I’m feeling good and happy and confident,” the 24-year-old Russo said.That on-pitch confidence, though, has not always been evident in Russo’s performances in the gap between that goal and her latest one.In fact, her goal in England’s 6-1 hammering of China ended a six-month international goal drought for Russo. In the interim, she had found herself battling for a place as the team’s starting striker with Rachel Daly. In an interview in England before the World Cup, Russo admitted that it had been a lesson in patience but also a learning experience in what it takes to keep a place on one of the world’s best teams.Alessia Russo, 24, scored her first World Cup goal in England’s last game in the group stage, against China.James Elsby/Associated Press“All I can do is focus on myself, my game, what I can do to get better and how ready I can be going into the summer,” she said. “And that’s all I can control.”Could the knockout stages, then, be liftoff for Russo? Despite the injuries to several key players that marred preparations for England and continued in Australia, the European champions have been building momentum ahead of their meeting with Nigeria on Monday in the round of 16. Midfielder Lauren James has emerged as a star in midfield, and Russo is poised to benefit.“She just really has a feeling for scoring goals,” England’s coach, Sarina Wiegman, said. “She is a good header. She has a good shot. She just is a real No. 9.”The statistics speak for themselves. Russo has scored 12 goals in 25 England appearances, among them an 11-minute hat trick — the fastest ever scored by an England women’s player.Such is her status that, earlier this year, she was the subject of two world-record transfer bids. Her club at the time, Manchester United, rejected both, but she has since joined Arsenal, the suitor that made both offers, on a free transfer after her United contract expired.Her rise, off the back of her performances in England’s triumph at the European Championship last year, has come at a historic time for the women’s game. Record viewing figures. Sold-out stadiums. And, as Russo knows all too well, competitive transfer windows.“It’s what we’ve wanted for the women’s game, for years and years,” she said. She wants the clamor to continue: “I hope to still see it climbing the way it is now. The stages it deserves. The crowds it deserves, which we’re all getting now.”Russo against Denmark. “I play my best football when I’m feeling good and happy and confident,” she said.Rick Rycroft/Associated PressRusso is still one of the younger players on her squad. But she is different in that she is used to being fully professional, something that not all of her teammates have experienced. England’s right back Lucy Bronze, for example, once worked at Domino’s Pizza as she made her way as a pro and an international.“There’s some really, really humbling stories that you hear of older players that have had to work crazy hours and then go to training and then travel to games,” Russo said. “And it’s just like, ‘How was that a thing?’”For Russo, soccer was always an easy choice. She grew up playing with her two older brothers in the yard and, at times, in the house, “until Mom would tell us off for kicking the ball inside.”She began her youth career at Charlton Athletic and later joined Chelsea before moving to the United States to play for the University of North Carolina. She only returned to England in 2020, after signing for Manchester United, the club she grew up supporting.Despite her path through professional teams and elite programs, though, Russo admitted to grappling with her newfound fame after the Euros. Before her team became European champions, she had a “pretty normal life,” she said. And now? “That’s changed.”“Your life,” she said, “completely changes after one tournament.” And stardom, she found — part of the same growth that has raised the value of players and the profile of the game — has proved difficult at times.“The attention that comes with women’s football now is hard to manage as a player,” she said.So after a quiet start to the World Cup, Russo has made her entrance. Next up: a tough encounter during England’s round-of-16 match against Nigeria, which beat the home team, Australia, and helped eliminate the Olympic champion, Canada, in the group stage.This spring, Russo said she was confident that the goals, and the wins, would eventually come. Now both are here, and England is thinking bigger.“You go into every single tournament wanting and expecting to win,” she said. The European Championship, she said, lit a “fire to want to go and win more.” Lifting the World Cup would be the ultimate next step.“I just want to win,” she said, “as much as I can.”Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters More

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    Manchester City Thumps Arsenal to Close on Premier League Title

    Reeling in the league leaders after a season-long chase, City won Wednesday and, with less than 10 games left, positioned itself to claim its third straight Premier League title.MANCHESTER, England — Quite when Arsenal knew, for certain, that it was all over is difficult to pinpoint absolutely. There was still faith, presumably, after Manchester City’s first goal, which arrived roughly 370 seconds into a game that had been billed — for weeks — as the Premier League’s great championship showdown.Some small sliver of optimism might even have endured after John Stones scored the second, delivered on a satellite delay after a video review not long before halftime. The last couple months of a season are a time for intellectual gymnastics and leaps of faith, after all, for the ifs and buts and maybes that soccer grandly calls “permutations.” Maybe a draw would do. Maybe a draw would keep the hope alive.The third goal, though, was different. After the third, Arsenal’s Rob Holding stood with his hands on his hips, staring off into the middle distance. Gabriel Magalhaes sunk to his haunches, as if contemplating the nature of grass. Thomas Partey started to clap, softly, his reflexes telling him to encourage his teammates. He managed two, lost heart, and stopped.Converted by Kevin De Bruyne, the third goal had taken whatever wisps of hope that remained for Arsenal and not only extinguished them, but razed their memory from the Earth, and then salted the ground so that they might never arise again. By the time Erling Haaland, hair flowing behind him, made it 4-1, it was hard to believe any hope had ever existed.Erling Haaland delivered the exclamation point in City’s 4-1 victory.Phil Noble/ReutersArsenal remains atop the Premier League, of course, 2 points ahead of Manchester City, but having played two more games. The team’s coach, Mikel Arteta, is not prepared to cede anything just yet — “I have been in this country for 22 years,” he said, “and I have seen how quickly things shift” — but that lead now seems like a technicality, the consequence of a fractured timeline, a quirk of scheduling.There are no guarantees in sports. But common sense and recent experience would suggest that 2 points is not nearly enough to be sustained through the end of the season in late May. Arteta and Arsenal did not just lose to Manchester City on Wednesday night. They were deprived of more than just hope. The wild reverie that this might all end with a first Premier League title in almost 20 years was exposed as an illusion.The tendency both inside and outside Arsenal will, naturally, be to suggest that Arteta and his team brought this all upon themselves. It would have been different, after all, had they not spent the last three weeks allowing the lead they had accrued over the course of the season to be eroded.Arsenal led by two goals at Liverpool, and drew. It led by two goals at West Ham, and drew. It gave Southampton, a candidate for relegation, a two-goal head start at the Emirates, mounted a stirring comeback, and drew. At the time in the season when the pressure mounts and the great separate themselves from the merely good, the logic runs, Arsenal was found wanting.Arsenal, the league leader most of the season, and still despite Wednesday’s loss, looked as if it knew its title challenge was over.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersKinder observers would point out the various mitigating circumstances: Arsenal’s squad is among the youngest in the league, and is ahead of its anticipated development. The team has sorely missed William Saliba, the cherubic linchpin of its defense, who fell to injury at the point of the season when he was needed the most. His absence has proved that Arteta does not have the resources, just yet, to stay the course.All of that, though, is to buy into the illusion, to fall into the trap of believing that there was any other conclusion to the one that will spool out over the next few weeks, to indulge the fantasy that Arsenal — that anyone — could realistically ever have done enough to see off Manchester City.As it proved rather neatly against the team that it identified as its key rival from the earliest days of the season, Manchester City is not just the best team in the Premier League; it is the best in the Premier League by a gap so wide and so clear and so deep that it cannot, to all intents and purposes, be bridged.There are, essentially, three schools of thought as to how that has been achieved. One has it that City’s supremacy is rooted in the undoubted brilliance of Pep Guardiola’s coaching, combined with the club’s almost flawless recruitment.Another, less kind, would suggest that it has been constructed largely through spending a billion dollars, give or take, on some of the finest players in the world, building a squad that is no deeper than its rivals but of such a high grade that none of them can compete. (City signed Kalvin Phillips, then a mainstay of the English national team, last summer. You may have forgotten.)The third, the most damning of all, would point out that the club is currently under investigation by the Premier League for 115 breaches of the competition’s financial rules, all of which are strenuously and repeatedly denied by City but may yet place a stain on every one of its achievements in the last decade.Jack Grealish, left, with Kevin De Bruyne, after the latter scored City’s third goal. He also scored its first.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesGrealish later had a less cordial interaction with Thomas Partey after a foul in midfield.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersWhatever the cause, though, the outcome is apparent. Guardiola’s team is now on course for a fifth Premier League title in six years, and a third in a row. Only one other team has done that: Manchester United. Only one other English side has won the hallowed treble of the league, F.A. Cup and Champions League, too: also Manchester United. City could do both in one season.It is, without question, the pre-eminent force of its era. Its blend of wealth, power and intelligence — what Arsène Wenger, the former Arsenal manager, once characterized as “petrol and ideas” — has swept all opponents aside. Manchester United has been through three managers and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to keep up, to no avail. Tottenham and Chelsea have imploded. Liverpool stayed the course for five years, and then crumpled.More than that, though, City’s dominance has changed the Premier League’s algorithm. Even when United was at its peak, the league always presented itself as more open, more democratic than Germany’s Bundesliga, say, or France’s Ligue 1, those personal fiefs of the high and mighty. Manchester City has exposed that as a fantasy. The Premier League is now no longer a competition a team wins. It is one that Manchester City loses.The idea that Arsenal, callow and naïve, might have stood in the way of that was — it turns out — nothing but an illusion. Arteta’s team has, as he was at pains to stress, led the league for “nine and a half months,” matching an “excellent side” stride for stride and, for a while, even outpacing it.There was always going to come a point, though, when it hit the wall, when Arsenal stumbled and City did not. It is the fate that has befallen everyone else. There was no reason to believe Arsenal would be an exception. In many ways, it is to the credit of Arteta and his players that the fantasy took so long, until the end of April, to break.But break it did, cold reality dawning under the lights of the Etihad. The game, the title challenge, the dream: They are all over now. By the time Haaland scored the fourth goal, it would not even have hurt anymore. It simply was, just as it was always going to be. More

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    Manchester City Beats Arsenal, and the Premier League Season Pivots

    Manchester City’s 3-1 victory lifted it over Arsenal and into first place in the Premier League. But the title race is far from over.LONDON — Erling Haaland was just starting to sprint when he remembered his manners. He was about to race off to celebrate yet another goal with Manchester City’s fans when he stopped, turned on his heel, and bounded over to Kevin De Bruyne instead, grabbing him by the forearm, roaring wordlessly in his face.In the ecstasy of the moment, it was not entirely clear what Haaland wanted his teammate to do. De Bruyne, certainly, seemed a little confused. Was Haaland merely thanking him for the assist on his goal? Was he inviting him to join in the celebrations? For a breath, both players stood at an impasse, wondering what to do next. And then Haaland took off again, hurtling toward the traveling supporters at full speed, his arms flailing in the air.By this stage, it is a wonder Haaland, the Norwegian striker, elicits any excitement from scoring. His latest goal gave him 26 in only 22 games in the Premier League since joining Manchester City last summer. He is on 32 in all competitions. Haaland does not so much harvest goals as factory farm them. He knew, though, that Wednesday’s was not just another goal. This one was different.Not just because it sealed City’s 3-1 win against Arsenal, or even because it confirmed Pep Guardiola’s team would leapfrog its opponent at the summit of the Premier League. Its significance was more deep-rooted than that. That goal, this victory, effected a profound shift in the psychology of the title race. It had the air of the hinge on which the season turned.Erling Haaland and Manchester City pulled ahead of Arsenal, for the moment, in the Premier League standings.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola, of course, had stressed this week that February is far too early for a single game to be conclusive, no matter how apocalyptic the tone of the prematch hype. The campaign is only narrowly past its halfway point. There are, as he said, so many games remaining. And besides, the arithmetic is skewed. Arsenal has a game in hand. Nothing, he was very clear, has been decided yet.Judging by the tableau of reactions to Haaland’s goal, that message had not quite made it through to City’s players. As Haaland tore away from De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan was in the corner, punching the air; Rúben Dias was locked in a tight, tender clinch with his coach, Guardiola cradling the defender’s face in his hands; Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish, both recently substituted, were racing back onto the field; and City’s coaching staff was howling into the night sky.It is only 10 days or so since Arsenal’s lead over City seemed if not insurmountable then certainly commanding. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team had beaten Tottenham in enemy territory, and had swatted aside Manchester United at home. Its lead over City had stretched to eight points. Arsenal’s youthful exuberance was slowly crystallizing into an imperious momentum; at some point, it had gone from being a club that hoped and become one that believed.Suggesting that tenor has been extinguished over the course of the last two weeks would be a stretch, but it is hard to deny that Arsenal has sputtered. First, Everton, its loins girded by a new manager, Sean Dyche, shut out the league leader at Goodison Park. Then Brentford, the Premier League’s specialist giant slayer, left the Emirates Stadium with a draw that was simultaneously fortuitous and largely merited.Suddenly, the daylight Arsenal had so painstakingly claimed at the top of the table had disappeared. City was right there, its breath hot on the necks of Arteta’s players. This game became less an examination of the comparative merits of two title contenders and more a test of Arsenal’s mettle.Martin Odegaard and Arsenal are winless in three games.David Klein/ReutersThe fact of defeat — to an opponent that has won four of the last five Premier League titles (for now, at least) — will sting rather less than the manner of it.Arsenal was hurried, rather than urgent, frantic, rather than intense. It looked, in other words, like exactly what it is: a work in progress, a young team on a steep trajectory but one that is yet to reach its apex. City’s first two goals, scored by De Bruyne and Grealish, came from avoidable errors, rushed decisions, poor choices. That happens to teams as they grow, of course. It was just not a great time for Arsenal to have a learning experience.City, by contrast, has honed its ruthlessness over the course of five seasons. On Wednesday, Guardiola’s team might not have played with its habitual control, the poise and the certainty that has become its hallmark; there was, instead, a frenzy to its performance, too, a fury that the club ordinarily reserves for any governing body that questions the legitimacy of its financial results.The temptation is to draw a direct link between the team’s performance and the 115 allegations of rule-breaking made by the Premier League last week, to suggest that Guardiola has successfully used those charges to convince his players — whom he had accused, not so long ago, of being rather too happy to rest on their laurels — that they have a cause to fight for, an injustice to set right.Perhaps that is true. Perhaps City’s squad has bought into the club’s conviction that it is on some rebel crusade, persecuted by the vested interests intent on doing it down. It is entirely possible that the players have been jolted out of whatever torpor Guardiola had detected by the seriousness of the allegations.Far more likely is that City’s players realized this was their chance. Manchester City has not been taking Arsenal lightly: that much was obvious when Ederson, the goalkeeper, was booked for time-wasting after barely half an hour, and when the team’s captain, Gundogan, was twice asked to calm his teammates down by the referee, Anthony Taylor.The difference, more than anything, was that City could channel that desperation, that hunger. That it could sense weakness and exploit it when Arsenal could not do the same. It does not mean anything is over, that Arsenal’s race is run. But for the first time in months, it feels like City has the edge, and that is often all it needs. More

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    How Arsenal Found Its Voice

    LONDON — On the night before the biggest game of Arsenal’s season so far, the fans slipped inside the Emirates Stadium to make sure everything was in place. Their leader and a handful of friends had spent weeks drawing up their plans: raising money, contacting suppliers, brainstorming themes, designing images, cutting out stencils, spray-painting letters.Now, late on a Friday night, there was just one job left to do. They had to check that every seat in Block 25 of the stadium’s Clock End contained a flag, either red or white, for the culmination of the display.The next day, they saw their vision realized. As the players of Arsenal and Tottenham took the field at the Emirates, Block 25 was transformed. “We Came, We Saw, We Conquered,” read one banner. “North London Is Red Since 1913,” ran another, a reference to Arsenal’s controversial relocation to this part of the city — and Tottenham territory — a century ago. Hundreds of flags fluttered under a clear blue sky.The display lasted barely more than an instant, all those hours of effort expended for a single, fleeting moment, a reverie that broke as soon as the whistle blew. Its impact, though, lasted substantially longer.After the game, Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, described the atmosphere inside the Emirates that afternoon as “probably the best I’ve seen in this stadium since I’ve been involved with the club,” a relationship that covers more than a decade. His captain, Martin Odegaard, made a point of thanking the fans, too. “It was amazing to play out there,” he said.In part, of course, that can be attributed to the result: Arsenal had beaten Tottenham, and victory in the North London derby is always something to be celebrated. The context helped, too: The win ensured that Arsenal remained at the summit of the Premier League for another week, a point ahead of Manchester City heading into this weekend, when Liverpool visits the Emirates.Color and crowds are part of every stadium matchday, but at Arsenal it’s the sound that is new.But this was not an isolated case. Over the last year or so, it has not been uncommon for Arteta and his players to gush over how noisy, how passionate, how ardent the Emirates has become. Inside the club, there is a sincere belief that the raucous atmosphere is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form.In a stadium long derided as among the quietest in English soccer, a crowd that had come to be seen as an advertisement for the dangers of the game’s gentrification — too posh, effectively, to push its team — has suddenly found its voice.That transformation can be traced not only to the energy and impetus provided by the group that has coalesced around a handful of founders — the Ashburton Army, inspired by the ultra faction factions common in European and South American soccer but still relatively rare in England — but to the determination of the club itself to allow them to solve a problem that dated back at least a generation.After all, the night before the biggest game of the season, as they sought to put the finishing touches on their work, someone had to let them in.Fans were never the problem at the Emirates. The atmosphere was.Ray Herlihy of RedAction, an Arsenal fan group.The blame for Arsenal’s reputation as a sedate, subdued sort of place is often placed on its departure from its longtime home at Highbury for the grand, sweeping bowl of the Emirates in 2006. Arsène Wenger, the manager who oversaw the relocation, always felt that Arsenal had “left its soul at Highbury.”It is a poetic, faintly romantic telling of history, but it may not be an accurate one. “The reputation started at Highbury,” said Ray Herlihy, founder of RedAction, a group that has been working to improve the atmosphere at Arsenal for two decades. “It was at Highbury that I got involved. That was where the Highbury Library nickname began.” All that was lost in the move, it turned out, was the rhyme.Unquestionably, the new stadium accentuated the issues. Clusters of fans who had sat together at Highbury suddenly found themselves separated. The Emirates’ design meant there was no obvious focal point where the noisiest, most fervent fans could gather. Highbury had boasted the twin poles of the Clock End and the North Bank; the Emirates had no natural equivalent.Most damaging of all was the divergence between the cost of tickets and the success of the team. The Emirates, famously, was home to the most expensive season ticket in English soccer. With younger fans priced out, the crowd started to skew older. “For a while, I think we had the highest average age of season-ticket holder,” Herlihy said. “And you’re not as animated at 65 as you might be at 25.”At the same time, Arsenal’s fortunes were waning. Wenger’s later years were marked not by title challenges but by an annual struggle simply to qualify for the Champions League, a decline that gave rise to a bitter, internecine debate over whether the Frenchman had outstayed his welcome.“There had been years of the Wenger Out campaign,” said Remy Marsh, a founder of the Ashburton Army (though he has, he said, subsequently “stepped away” from the group.) “There was an undeniable toxicity.” Much of it was captured, every week, by the cameras of Arsenal Fan TV, full of furious rants and factional squabbles. “It ruined a whole generation,” Marsh said.By the end of the last decade, pretty much everyone agreed that the atmosphere at the Emirates was in dire need of repair. One described it as “flat.” Herlihy admitted the club’s games “struggled” to generate much noise. Marsh called it “lackluster.”“The chants were lacking,” Marsh said. “There wasn’t much variation. It had become a stigma for the club.”Arsenal, it turned out, was harboring much the same thought.The Ashburton Army, at the outset, was hardly a heavyweight organization. It was an attempt to bring elements of the ultra spirit to Arsenal — the big tifo displays, the pyrotechnics; “they were always singing, always supporting,” one of the group’s leaders said, “and I didn’t see why we couldn’t have that here” — but it was based around a single group chat. The Army, then, had barely more than a dozen members.That was enough, though, to catch the club’s eye. Arsenal was not unique among Premier League clubs in trying to solve the riddle presented by the league’s global appeal: how to maintain an atmosphere when its stadium was, increasingly, filled by corporate guests and day-tripping tourists there to sample the experience, rather than contribute to it.Its solution may offer a blueprint to other teams with precisely the same problem. “We encourage our staff to listen informally to fans,” said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s chief executive.When Marsh emailed the club to outline what the group hoped to achieve, they were invited to meet with the fan liaison team. The Ashburton Army wanted to remain independent, but the club was happy not only to tolerate them, but to help.Flags placed by the Ashburton Army before the Tottenham match.A band playing the fans out after the home team’s 3-1 win.That resolve was only strengthened, Venkatesham said, by the coronavirus pandemic. “We had 62 games without fans,” he said. “It gave us perspective and time to evaluate ourselves, to ask if we were listening enough, if the fans felt like they were at the center of every decision.”The sight of the Emirates “standing silent” for a year, he said, reinforced the idea that “fans were not just an ingredient for football, they were the ingredient.” We want fans to feel close and connected to the club,” Venkatesham said. “The Emirates Stadium is the epicenter for that, and from there it spreads out across the globe.”Herlihy, a veteran of Arsenal’s fan outreach programs, had long felt the club paid lip service to the idea of listening to their views. “They talked a good game,” he said. “But there was no real engagement.”That changed, Herlihy said, after the onset of the pandemic and the controversy over Arsenal’s involvement in the short-lived European Super League. “You know what they say: The streets don’t forget,” he said. “After that, there was a real change of tone. They engaged properly with these issues.”The effects of that have been many and varied. The club has, at the instigation of the players, embraced the work of Louis Dunford, a local songwriter; one of his songs, known as “North London Forever,” has become a sort of unofficial Arsenal anthem, played before the start of every game at the Emirates. “It happened organically,” said Venkatesham. “None of it can be forced.”Arsenal officials think the increasingly raucous atmosphere at the Emirates is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form. Arsenal leads the Premier League heading into a weekend visit from Liverpool. Other changes have been small, barely perceptible — the club has made it easier for fans to sell tickets for games they cannot attend, and has warned that season-ticket holders who regularly leave their seats empty will be stripped of their rights to them — but have contributed, Herlihy said, to a sense that fans are being heard.None more so than the Ashburton Army. When fans returned to stadiums, the club helped to move its growing ranks — now comprising a couple of hundred members — en masse. “When we started, we were sitting at the back of a block,” one of the group’s leaders said. “That made it hard for the noise to travel.” Their new slot, in what has been known since 2010 as the stadium’s Clock End, is at the very front. The acoustics there, they say, are much better.“We try and support fan groups however we can,” Venkatesham said. The banner RedAction unfurled at the North London derby — spanning the width of the stadium — had, for example, been financed by the club. Arsenal does not have the same relationship with the Ashburton Army, but it does, he said, “give them access to the stadium so they can set up before games.”After two decades of trying, the approach seems to have worked. Nobody is under any illusions: It helps, of course, that Arteta has put together not just a bright, young team, stocked with homegrown players, but a winning one, too. But just as they have driven the atmosphere at the Emirates, so the atmosphere has driven them.“The Ashburton Army have shown the rest of the stadium how it should be done,” Herlihy said. His seat, at the opposite end of the stadium, affords him a perfect view of the group in action: 90 minutes of “noise and movement,” every single one of them dressed not in club colors, but in the black uniform of any self-respecting ultra.“They’re doing what we all did years ago, and what we thought you couldn’t do any more,” he said. “They’re going to the football with their mates, and they’re having fun. And it’s more fun to have fun at football.” More

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    Unai Emery Is Back for More

    NEW YORK — It has been more than three years now, but Unai Emery still remembers the moment as if he had just witnessed it. When he brings it up, all the frustration he felt on that day in March 2019 comes rushing back.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has just claimed the ball, the clock has ticked beyond the 90th minute and the referee has brought calm to the chaos. Arsenal has won a penalty, a last-gasp opportunity to win the match. It is also a chance for Emery, in his first season as Arsenal’s coach, to drag his team into the Champions League at the expense of the club’s bitter North London neighbor, Tottenham Hotspur.But Aubameyang, usually a lock from the penalty spot, fails to score. That shot, that missed opportunity, was the moment, as far as Emery is concerned, that ended not only Arsenal’s hopes of playing alongside European soccer royalty, but also his hold on his job as Arsenal’s manager.“We played a good season, and we were very close, but this moment…,” Emery says, allowing the sentence to trail off. He has made his point.For Emery, now two seasons into what has been by most metrics a hugely successful effort to rebuild his career at the Spanish club Villarreal, it is not only soccer games that are defined by moments: a missed penalty or a late save, a blown lead or a match-winning goal. Entire careers, he knows as well as anyone, can also be upended — or sent off on new, unexpected trajectories — by a single moment here or there.Emery, 50, did not fall all the way down the ladder after his firing at Arsenal. He was out of work only months before he landed the next summer at Villarreal, where he has directed a golden run that he believes has once again established his credentials for one of the sport’s top jobs. At least one Premier League club has come calling. (He said no.) More big clubs will follow. Emery sounds like a man who is ready to listen.“I think I recovered my level to keep in future my challenge high, high, high,” he said, raising his hands above his head. “I am very ambitious.”Emery with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in 2019. Player, Coach and Arsenal fans know what happened next.David Klein/ReutersHe has already been to soccer’s heights, after all: victories in three European finals with Sevilla, two seasons coaching Paris St.-Germain in the Champions League, then that call to go to London to manage in the Premier League.In 2018, Emery was tasked with leading Arsenal into the future, with managing its transition from 24 years under Arsène Wenger. The Emery era started well enough, with 11 consecutive victories, the club’s best run of form in more than a decade. But then came the botched penalty, the failure to leapfrog Tottenham in the standings, the bitter loss to Chelsea in the Europa League final. Emery survived the summer, but in November, after an extended winless run, Arsenal showed him the door.His morale-sapping departure has been traded for a two-year adventure in western Spain, a thrill ride that has delivered Villarreal’s first major trophy, moments of glory against some of soccer’s mightiest teams and proof, at least to Emery, that he can still be considered one of the game’s finest coaches.His most eye-catching successes came last season, when he took his team — a mix of rugged veterans, big-club castoffs and promising youngsters — on an improbable jaunt through the Champions League. Villarreal eliminated Juventus and Bayern Munich before threatening a comeback of cinematic proportions against Liverpool in the semifinals.That journey, Emery said, was built on players who rose to the occasion when their moment came. Much of Villarreal’s success was forged on the training field, he said, by practicing set pieces and counterattacks, by drilling into players the idea that they had to dig in and stick to a plan.“That is the difference you can reduce with other teams,” Emery said. In his view, coaches can improve their players and their teams by 10 or 15 percent. The rest is up to them, to a blend of preparation, belief and poise in critical moments.“How can I explain it?” he said. “Last year, we were worse when we played against Arsenal in the semifinals of the Europa League. We were worse than them. They were better than us. But our work before arriving to play against them — we created a very good mentality, and that is when one coach could make his team better than one that has better players.”It was a formula he brought to bear again in the Champions League last spring. Before each two-legged tie in the knockout rounds, Emery said, he told his players that they should expect to suffer and be outplayed for large spells, but that they should believe their chance would come to unsettle the opponent, either defensively or offensively. “When they start to suffer,” Emery said, “is when you can win.”Villarreal’s Pau Torres scoring against Juventus in the Champions League.Antonio Calanni/Associated PressAfter beating Juventus, Villarreal went on to eliminate Bayern Munich, too.Massimo Pinca/ReutersThe moments were unforgettable. A 3-0 victory at Juventus. A stunning first-leg victory over Bayern Munich in Spain, and then an 88th-minute goal to eliminate the Germans on their home field. Against Liverpool, Villarreal overturned a 2-0 first-leg deficit within 41 minutes to leave its opponent shaken and its stadium rocking.Liverpool regained its footing and survived — other teams get to have their moments, too — but the Champions League run has raised the profile of Villarreal’s best players. Some will move on. Their coach admits he probably will as well one day.He has already knocked back the advances of some suitors, including an approach from Newcastle United after the Premier League club was acquired by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. “It was not the right moment,” Emery said of his decision last November. Newcastle, for all its new riches, was last in the table at the time, and Villarreal was in the Champions League.That competition, he and his players knew, could change perceptions in ways that success in the Spanish league could not.“I’m in a very good environment to feel strong, to feel confident again, adding confidence in my work,” Emery said of his post at Villarreal. “And then, a new challenge.”Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the beginning of his tenure, Emery said, he had planned to focus on the league. “But when we beat Atalanta and when we played against Juventus, the Champions League was, for me, more important,” Emery said. The club was getting recognition for its successes, and for players and coaches alike the performances could catapult their careers in new directions. “I know I have individual challenges as well,” Emery said.Emery had arrived at Villarreal bruised by the nature of his Arsenal exit. Those wounds are not completely healed. He described the departure in Spanish as a golpe — a blow. By the time he was fired, Emery was facing criticism that at times felt more personal than professional: Long before the end, former players and parts of the news media had taken aim at his command of English.Those criticisms still smart: When a fan at a preseason match in England recently goaded Emery by asking him to say, “Good ebening,” the coach responded with an obscene gesture that went viral.At Villarreal, the team’s wealthy owners have provided Emery a platform to find balance in his life, as well as a space to rebuild a belief in his style of coaching. But Emery said he was certain that his success was not a case of a coach’s finding his level, of a leader most comfortable one rung below the elite. “I’m in a very good environment to feel strong, to feel confident again, adding confidence in my work,” he said. “And then, a new challenge.”His determination to return to the top is perhaps best demonstrated by his extracurricular activities: While he has been re-establishing his credentials in Spain, he has also been working hard on his English. He described his summer trip to New York as a learning opportunity as much as a vacation with his son, Lander. It is perhaps a tacit admission that not all of the criticism during his time at Arsenal was wide of the mark.He has been ruminating on those moments at Arsenal when he could not quite get his message across, or those crucial early conversations with key players when linguistic barriers made it hard to create the type of coach-player bond essential to winning teams.“The next time I will arrive with better English,” he said.That time may come soon. For now, though, Emery is prepared to bide his time, to wait for the right moment.Jackie Molloy for The New York Times More